And I went to Bouverie Street, and… Punch office was a very impressive building, it was like going to a gentlemen's club. And the men all wear pin-striped suits and that kind of thing, and there was a very sort of efficient secretary, who put me in a waiting room, and I sat next to a woman who was waiting there and I know now it was an artist called Pearl Faulkner, who I rather admired, but I didn't know that then, and the secretary came and brought me some magazines to look at, and said, 'Would you like to have a look at these?' And it was The New Yorker, which I hadn't seen, and which I sat there reading. And after about three-quarters of an hour this woman disappeared, and the secretary came back, and said, 'Are you still here?' And I said, 'Yes, I'm waiting to see the Art Editor'. And she said, 'Oh, we thought you were with that woman who was here'. And so there was this schoolboy was supposed to be her… the visitor's nephew or something like that. And it was too late then. She said, 'Oh no, you can't see him now, he's desperately snowed under', and so on and so on. So I had to go away and come back later.

In fact, the Art Editor had changed. Kenneth Bird had become the Editor of Punch, and the Art Editor was Russell Brockbank, who was a Canadian, who drew motor cars. And jokes about motor cars. Which he drew very well. He knew all about them, and was actually very nice to me, and they actually bought two of those drawings. There was a letter followed later, when I… after I'd been to see him again with a letter, which said, 'Congratulations to the youngest contributor' on it, which I think you have to say, really. Not that, I mean, Punch had a great tradition of youngest contributors. They were terrible drawings, really. They were very small, but they were in print, and… I suppose I was… I think I was 16 at the time. And I remember taking them, I showed them to… Mac, you know, the Headmaster, and… he had an extraordinary way of relating things to himself, and he… he looked at… and he could not… he put one hand over one eye, and his other eye bulged alarmingly, in a slightly sort of bloodshot kind of way, and he looked at it. 'Oh yes', he said. He said, 'Well, I was never in Punch'. You know, kind of gesturing at the other magazines that he must have been in at one time or another, although he didn't draw at all. And he was very good at things like that. If there was some small crime in the classroom, he'd come and at one point would say, 'I wasn't in Scotland Yard for nothing'. So this was… anyway, that must have fed my interests in some way or other.